Bess: You are welcome.

TChem: Haven't read "Jonathan Strange..." but I've heard good things about it. I probably can find a copy at one of the used bookstores around here (I think that will work better for me than checking it out of the library; as I remember it was a longish book - and with my hectic life, it can take me a while to get through a book.)

As for the others you listed - well - ha ha ha ha ha - with the exception, I think, of "Salt," they are all on my shelf awaiting my reading them. I'm really bad about buying books - I don't get too bookstores all that often so I tend to buy books five and six at a time when I get somewhere where there's a good bookstore. I have more books now than I will read in what remains of my life, likely. It's one of my blind spots - like with yarn - where I am very much a consumer. The funny thing is elsewhere in my life, I try hard to have as little impact as I can on the world and its resources. But books - gotta have 'em.

I thought of another book that was "unconventional" but that I enjoyed immensely. (I had to go digging for it; I usually remember where stuff is in terms of a "where was it last" system of organization. Which means when I do a lot of cleaning or reorganization it takes a while to re-find certain things). But I found it - it's called "Our Lady of the Lost and Found." The author is Diane Schoemperlen.

Basically, it's a story where Mary (yes, THAT Mary) shows up at a woman's house because she's just so tired of everyone asking for so many things from her, and she needs a little vacation from it...along the way there's all this Marian lore, tales of sightings and miracles. The book is funny and yet there's profoundness to it. And it's so "strange" - so different from the conventional.

I enjoy books that look at faith or spirituality from a sort of cockeyed perspective. I do not like most of the traditional "pious" books, or at least the ones that have come out in the last 40 years or so.

Another book I just started - which was really what made me remember the Mary book - is one I bought yesterday. I took a trip over to Ardmore - I HAD to get out, I wanted to do something different. Ardmore has a really nice small indie bookstore I've gone to, and also a gourmet shop, and there's a sort-of-economically-depressed mall that does still have a large Hobby Lobby in it. The trip was mostly disappointing (except I found a bunch of clearance wool-ease for 83 cents a ball; I bought a couple of kids' sweaters worth with the plan of making them for that Guideposts sweater project). But I did get a few books at the bookstore.

One of the ones I bought, sort of on a whim (and in fact, almost did not buy it; now I'm glad I did) is caled "The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show." (author: Ariel Gore.) It is about a young woman who has the ability to make stigmata appear at will (at least, when she is hungry enough). She joins up with a sort-of-Catholic-themed traveling freak show that is led by a large transvestite who is fond of dressing as a nun....It's a weird book but there's also something kind of endearing about it (I'm about 1/3 of the way in). There's the theme of people who lack family finding a family of sorts (is there not an old saying, "God puts the lonely in families"?) and although the freak show itself is a parody and sort of heretical, and the characters in it are definitely NOT saints, the young woman who is the narrator is religious and even has talked with the saints...so it is a wonderful strange contradictory mix.

(Interesting: the sermon this morning focused, in part, on the idea that traditional Christians may have come to be closer to the Pharisees these days than they are to the early Church. One of the challenges the minister offered was what would we do - I mean the specific we, the local congregation- if some of the world's "untouchables" (e.g., the homeless, AIDS patients, addicts...) showed up wanting to attend services. And you know - the characters in this book would all be pretty much regarded as untouchables by "polite society." Without giving too much away: a transvestite, a woman who was seriously domestically abused, an illegal immigrant, a bearded lady [yes, literally]. It's funny, the synchronicity of ideas that happens sometimes...I was also listening to a radio program driving over to Ardmore yesterday that focused on coincidences and one of the speakers, a man who had written a book on the matter, called them "signposts" and also said he thought of it as being like God winking at you. Interesting. Or maybe I'm just so used to seeing patterns that I see patterns where they don't exist...)

And I like that. I find myself drawn these days to things that are not too neat or too cut-and-dried. Again, I think it's that moral complexity that I spoke about being present in several of my "important books."

Other than that, I've turned the heel on the first "Barley Sugar Column" sock this weekend, and started the second sleeve of the Hourglass sweater. I also finished the blocks for the current quilt and am contemplating laying them out and beginning to put them together.